How technology is empowering agents in today’s Welsh contact centres

Adam Faulkner, founding director of contact centre experts Sabio, highlights how contact centre agents are now able to take more control of their careers

The secret behind every successful contact centre operation is its people; more specifically the agents who spend their time dealing with customers on a day to day basis. The organisations running these contact centres have worked out that if they give their agents the flexibility, freedom and support they need to carry out their job to the best of their ability, they will enjoy their work more and be more productive – it’s a win/win situation.

An innovation called Workforce Optimisation is helping contact centres manage their agents better – or to be more accurate, enabling the agents themselves to manage their own working schedules.

With today’s latest workforce optimisation (WFO) solutions, agents are provided with the tools they need to manage their own schedules, effectively personalising their own shift patterns while gaining more control over their working life. The results show that when agents are given more control they are more proactive in their work. And by giving agents more control, organisations can in turn provide a far more positive environment for agents to work in – and one that they are more likely to stay working in.

WFO systems aren’t just used by HR managers, but are now starting to provide agents with real control over their daily schedules. For example, some of the latest solutions enable agents to book holidays using ‘self-service’. Agents are provided with access to a business wide agent holiday calendar to see when others have already booked leave in contrast to forecasted call demands for those dates. This means that they can request and automatically receive confirmation for their holiday dates themselves, without needing to wait for approval by their team leader or contact centre manager.

Through other workforce optimisation applications agents are empowered to arrange shift-swaps with their colleagues using a central exchange capability. This provides the agent with the power to work when they choose, while also saving the team leader time. Some companies are also taking advantage of another approach – preference-based scheduling – to make sure that shift patterns reflect individual agent preferences. Of course, there are certain shifts that always need to be worked, but organisations now recognise and value the need for agents to be happier with their own shift patterns, and are taking steps to be as accommodating as possible.

For example, if an agent always likes to play football on Saturday afternoon, it makes sense for that preference to be made clear and to try not to schedule shifts for them at that time. In Wales, for example, we work with Newport City Council’s contact centre whose approach to an integrated Workforce Optimisation approach has been a key driver behind Newport’s recent Excellence in Wales success.

Significantly, Newport City Council’s workforce optimisation solution is geared towards employee self-determination. Every agent can access roster information and reserve the shifts that they want to work in order to achieve a flexible work/ life balance. They can plan their shift patterns, holidays and even car sharing through the system, and they can access it without the need for a supervisor.

“We forecast five weeks in advance, and employees are able to input their preferences into the system before rosters are produced so they can be taken into account when created” says Helen Gunter, Contact Centre Manager at Newport City Council. “After that, employees can swap their own shifts, view their working pattern and also drill down to see what duties and breaks they have been allocated. It works so well that there is rarely the need to even adjust lunch-breaks. Our workforce management system is essential to planning and agent satisfaction. Very shortly we will also be offering our agents the ability to access this functionality from home via the web with the system being intelligent enough to be able to automatically process their leave requests.”

At Sabio we are also helping NHS Direct Wales – the 24 hour NHS phone-based health advice and information service for Wales – with its Workforce Optimisation applications. Under the contract, we will provide support to help manage some 350 advisors and nurses across three contact centres in Swansea, Gwent and Bangor. When fully live, the solution will manage the organisation’s complex shift patterns to ensure a correctly-staffed 24-hour service for the people of Wales.

It’s clear that workforce optimisation technology is helping a growing number of Welsh contact centre agents to gain more control over their shift patterns, and is contributing to a more acceptable work/life balance for many agents. We also believe that this will be an important contributor to helping Welsh contact centres become more attractive as a career option for 2007 and beyond.